ugh yea, this design is bothering me more and more as i look at it, Its great to have a super tall in chicago, but unlike LA's Wilshire, SF salesforce, and Philly's Comcast, or the spire all of which will be instant classics, this design is a turd, the three diff heights.....just really makes it look like 3 sep buildings...IMO if it was just slightly thinner and looked liked a single tower vs 3 thing tower it would look great.

Honestly, LouisVanDerWright, your sketches are 100000000x better, i hope to god this isn't the final design

Excuse my shitty 10 min sketch, but you get the picture. Stacked frustrums that weave in and out in three bundled tubes with the middle one stopping short. I ran out of paper or I'd have finished the top, but you can see the general massing I sketched out to the left before I did the right one. I can see why Lowemburg would probably go at this with a VE chainsaw. Of course I have no idea what this actually looks like, but just trying to demonstrate the general massing Pilsenarch seems to be describing.

Well I personally love the Gang design. It is the most adventurous Chicago highrise design since the Spire. I'm so sick of glass boxes and halfbaked concrete pomo designs. This is a refreshing departure even if Gang is a master at green washing.

Well, nice to get something other than another bland box that we always seems to get. Nevertheless, my first reaction is a little guarded. Not sure I love it. It does seem a little ungainly, and chunky. Definitely not from the tall and thin school of thinking. Maybe it'll grow on me over time .

EDIT: It looks better after I zoom the image and notice a lot more detail.

If this is the real design indeed, then I'm more than satisfied with it at this location. There's still the site at LSE that hugs LSD, and this design is far superior and more interesting than 111 wacker by an immeasurable margin. There could potentially be 2 more supertalls within a few hundred yards of this futuristic building- if built. I think most of us chicago folks are in no position to be anything less than excited about this. We'll see how legit this financing is, and only time will tell whether this is realistic. However, I'm excited to even see something like this pop up and grab my interest for now.

More trivia than anything else, but a building there would kill most of the view of Aqua from the river (meaning the tour boat crowd would see less of it). I guess Gang probably wouldn't care since the thing blocking the view of her building is also her building.

Not sure how I feel about the design. I think it would be better as two tall sections on each side. Something more like this... (quick job to give the idea)

Perhaps cut the height of the middle section in half as well.

I love the height, but the massing is off. I would like to see more detailed renders, but I think that the tall portion should be in the middle, the short one to the West, and the middle one on the East. And I'm not sure I like the the shape, I'm having a hard time seeing how each chunk is going to fit and interface with each other. It should look cool IRL though, I think the way each section casts shadows across the other with the recesses will make it look a bit more dynamic and less bulky.

I would almost like to see a smooth, curved look as opposed to the angled look, it would fit with Aqua better.

This:

( )
) (
( )
) (
( )

as opposed to this:

\ /
/ \
\ /
/ \
\ /

And with the highest portion, continue the contour, even just a skeleton, and have a spire that adds 200' or so.

-I agree the massing is kind of awkward. (Maybe it could be mitigated by having a lighter color or feel to the tallest protruding portion, and a heavier color or feel to the lower portions, or some other commonly-deployed visual sleight of hand.) I wonder why the center and west portions are so short; it would look better if they were taller by a frustum or two. After all, rents are higher on higher floors.

-Magellan will no longer be in control, as Wanda is buying 90% of the project. With Magellan retaining only 10%, and this being a new 5-star hotel market entry for Wanda, maybe we can expect much less VE-ing?

-Despite it becoming a Wanda project, they're sticking with Gang and the basic plans she and Magellan came up with. This seems it could raise the prospect that other successful local developers could become "pre-developers" who prepackage location identification, parcel and approvals preparation, programs, and designs for Chinese or other information-poor, capital-abundant developers who come in and take over. (Probably what Davies was thinking at the Post Office, although he found a local partner, so far.) It goes beyond just raising debt or equity from those parts of the world; it provides an excellent, easy conduit for foreign developers to successfully, quickly enter the Chicago market, and also could allow our local developers to quickly free their teams to start looking at further projects.

-This height would exceed NYC's One57 and most supertalls proposed there, other than three that are impossibly thin and would be impressive if completed but are hardly assured of reaching that stage.

-If there wasn't a Chinese word for "frustum" yet, there sure will be now.

I understand the apprehension towards the design. It's definitely different, but it has an oddly "Chicago" flair to it...in the sense that these tube-like structures of three different heights are aligned in a row in a way that's not unlike the 9 bundled tubes of the Willis Tower. Kind of like a strange love-child between Willis and Trump. Also it's clear that this rendering is preliminary and that the design will likely be fine-tuned somewhat.

I'll wait and see. I just still want them to build The Chicago at Michigan and Roosevelt XD

__________________"Also, to be frank, I like dense cities best and care about them most." from The Death And Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.